Tyrie hits out at HSBC over IT failures

Treasury Committee chair Andrew Tyrie has criticised HSBC over continued problems with its online banking service, suggesting there are “systemic” issues with banks’ IT systems.

Personal and business account customers were unable to access their accounts on Monday and Tuesday this week, with services returning last night.

Customers of HSBC subsidiary First Direct have not been affected.

The bank previously suffered a service outage in August, which prevented 275,000 payments going through just ahead of the Bank Holiday weekend.

Tyrie says: “Barely six months after the last glitch in their underperforming IT systems, HSBC is apologising again to its customers.

“The frequency of these failures across the financial services sector suggests a systemic weakness in IT infrastructure. This is concerning.

“I will be asking the chief executive of HSBC, and the regulators, for an explanation of these failures, and action taken to sort them out. They just keep coming.”

HSBC UK chief operating officer John Hackett told the BBC yesterday the problems were caused by internal issues with the banks systems.

He said: “I’d like to apologise once more for any inconvenience that this technical issue has caused. We will be waiving any fees incurred as a result of this incident; and we will be happy to help all our customers with any issues that have arisen.”

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